Prior art provides for headlights in a vehicle that are used to illuminate the road immediately ahead of the vehicle while driving at night. Some vehicles also provide for headlights that swivel based on sensing the steering wheel turning, to sense a curve in the road and thus swivel the headlights to illuminate the curved road ahead.
These headlights are not entirely satisfactory for various safety conditions that drivers, driving at night, might face. In one illustration of such a safety condition, at night, in non-urban or country and rural areas, these areas are not lighted and do not provide any ambient lighting that would enable a driver to see anything other than the road immediately ahead, in front of the vehicle, that has been lighted by the headlights. Driving at night, without any visual reference other than the road immediately ahead may cause drivers to be disoriented or experience a vertigo effect. Vertigo has been defined in a dictionary as follows:
vertigo/ver•ti•go/(ver´t{hacek over (i)}-go) [L.] a sensation of rotation or movement of one's self (subjective v.) or of one's surroundings (objective v.) in any plane.
Vertigo is the feeling that you or your environment is moving or spinning. It differs from dizziness in that vertigo describes an illusion of movement. When you feel as if you yourself are moving, it's called subjective vertigo, and the perception that your surroundings are moving is called objective vertigo.
Vertigo occurs when there is conflict between the signals sent to the brain by various balance and position-sensing systems of the body. Your brain uses input from four sensory systems to maintain your sense of balance and orientation to your surroundings. These sensory inputs are from:
Vision gives you information about your position and motion in relationship to the rest of the world. This is an important part of the balance mechanism and often overrides information from the other balance-sensing systems.
Sensory nerves in your joints allow your brain to keep track of the position of your legs, arms, and torso. Your body is then automatically able to make tiny changes in posture that help you maintain your balance (proprioception).
Skin pressure sensation gives you information about your body's position and motion in relationship to gravity.
A portion of the inner ear, called the labyrinth, which includes the semicircular canals, contains specialized cells that detect motion and changes in position. Injury to or diseases of the inner ear can send false signals to the brain indicating that the balance mechanism of the inner ear (labyrinth) detects motion. If these false signals conflict with signals from the other balance and positioning centers of the body, vertigo may occur.
As has been described above, vision is an integral part of balance and position sensing systems of the body. Vision gives you information about your position and motion in relationship to the rest of the world. This is an important part of the balance mechanism and often overrides information from the other balance-sensing systems. Hence, driving at night with no visibility except that from the narrow area lighted ahead of the vehicle from the headlights impairs that part of vision that gives us information about our position and motion in relationship to the environment.
Hence new headlights are required to address these and other safety issues and concerns. It is the objective of the embodiments herein to be able to provide an improved design for vehicle lights that would alleviate these safety concerns. It is further the objective to provide for lighting around the vehicle for extra-vehicle activity such as access to the vehicle for loading/unloading at night.